One of my favorite aspects of Final Girls Berlin Film Festival is their consistently fantastic slate of films. Even if they screen a film that doesn’t necessarily work for me, I can still appreciate it on merit. I was excited to see Mi Bestia on their lineup when I read through their press release for their 10th annual film festival. There was some good press coverage of it, and it sounded like an incredibly important film for the world we live in today. So, how exactly does Camila Beltrán’s directorial feature debut hold up?
Mi Bestia follows Mila (Stella Martinez), a 13-year-old girl living in Bogotá. The year is 1996, and the date is quickly approaching June 6th. As 06/06/96 approaches, Colombian news officials and church officials raise alarm as an impending lunar eclipse is on the horizon. Religious panic sweeps the clergy at Mila’s school, putting them all on high alert. As the clock ticks down to the blood moon, Mila starts to notice changes in her body.
As I stated when I covered Tiger Stripes in 2023 for Final Girls, female puberty is something I [probably] won’t have to deal with. And I know it’s much more difficult for young women than for young men. While I won’t ever understand the trials and tribulations of female puberty, it’s easy to empathize with the pain, both physical and mental, of it. Co-writer/director Camila Beltrán’s (with co-writer Silvina Schnicer) directorial feature debut, like Tiger Stripes, provides yet another wonderful exploration of puberty and finds a fantastic way to inject some excellent body horror into it.
Mi Bestia packages the idea of puberty in a way that focuses less on female bullying, which many stories like this do, and takes a slower, more methodical route to unravel its madness. Stella Martinez excels as Mila and brings so much depth to this quiet character. Instead of having one main foil character for Mila, the foil is broken up through a few side characters, but none are as prevalent and fantastic as Dora (Mallerly Murillo). Martinez may be the main character but Mallerly Murillo steals the show with an incredibly grounded and authentic performance.
Where Mi Bestia loses itself slightly is through its visual motifs. Instead of using one visual as the throughline for Mila’s puberty, Beltrán tries to get a bit too fancy with it. This creates a slightly uneven project that makes the film feel less confident than it deserves to be. Beltrán and cinematographer Sylvain Verdet create some beautiful moments in the film, but using the moon, plants, and owls to symbolize Mila’s bodily journey becomes a bit too much. Which I guess could be meta-symbolism for a young woman’s journey. However, again, it doesn’t feel like a film is confident enough to do so.
Besides my hangup with the visual motifs, Mi Bestia is a beautiful exploration of something I’ve never dealt with. It’s hard to verbalize how much I appreciate films like this, Tiger Stripes, and slightly tangential to this kind of story but still similar, My Animal. As I stated, it’s easy to empathize with journeys like these, even though it’s one I won’t take in my lifetime. However, it’s still important to see it cemented in film. Sometimes, you need to be reminded and placed in a perspective that isn’t your own just to remind you of the struggles others go through; sometimes, it’s easy to forget how easy you had/have it. This is why festivals like Final Girls Berlin Film Festival are so important.
Mi Bestia is a well-shot slow-burn that usefully doles out horror at just the right moments. Some may think it’s a bit too slow or doesn’t have enough horror, but for its 76-minute runtime, I think it does an excellent job at what it’s trying to do. Camila Beltrán has a few shorts under her belt, but it’s clear that having Mi Bestia as a debut feature film is the first notch of many on what will be an impressive belt.